by Judy Astley
‘No, well, I wouldn’t,’ she snapped. ‘You don’t see a lot of those in a school uniform, do you?’
‘Oh yah – funny!’ He was now walking down the last of the steps with her. ‘Which school?’
‘Not round here, miles away, near Richmond,’ she said, making her way down the steps. He wasn’t bad-looking. Not that she was staring at him. Why had he now changed direction to come down to the station with her? They’d reached the barrier and she swiped her Oyster to open the entry gates.
‘So what are you doing over here, with your bag of old clothes?’
‘Why do you want to know?’ She was thrilled by his curiosity. That was the thing with girls’ schools, you felt so ludicrously pleased if a boy who didn’t look totally bleugh so much as glanced at you. She really was staring at him now, taking in his soft, round face, perfect teeth, blue-grey eyes, blond surfer-streaky hair that was too long, but in a good way, not in the old Justin Bieber wraparound way. It was private-school hair, she decided; it was falling into his eyes so he had to keep flicking, and only posh boys flick. She should just wave goodbye right now and go down the last steps to the platform, but here were the two of them, going nowhere, one each side of the entry barrier as other travellers rushed through.
‘I just like to know who’s hangin’ down ma endz.’ He shrugged and grinned at her. ‘Catch you round?’
And then he was gone. Hadn’t even asked her name. Getting her number tagged in his phone would have been something to tell at school. She felt deflated, disappointed, even though he had that yah yah voice that she and her friends always found so funny, especially when he was trying to talk rapper. If her best friend Emmy was with her, they’d be giggling, ‘Eugh, he’s like soo Jack Wills,’ and pulling faces the second he was out of sight.
But all the same, he’d said this was his ‘endz’. Notting Hill was also Rachel’s endz because it was her father’s and she was often there. Maybe the boy was right; she might see him around. She really hoped so, anyway.
FIVE
IT WAS FRIDAY evening before Viola got a chance to talk to Naomi about moving back home. Naomi had been out with her friends Monica and Elspeth in the afternoon to see a horror film and had come bouncing back home glowing with the thrill of having watched something truly, disgustingly macabre. ‘Only a nice Midsomer Murders repeat will settle me now,’ she said with deep satisfaction, leaving Viola wondering what kind of woman finds a crime drama with at least three gruesome murders ‘calming’. Viola made a jug of Pimm’s and they sat out on the terrace in the warm evening sun.
‘I feel a bit bad about leaving you here alone,’ Viola said, once she’d managed to tell Naomi her plans to move back to her own home. ‘Are you sure it’s all right? Kate thinks I’m being selfish.’
‘Of course it’s all right! I’ve been living here on my own for years. I’m not going to start mithering about the lack of company now. It’s not about that business the other night, is it? Because moving out for that would be just plain daft.’
‘No, no, it’s nothing to do with that.’ Viola briefly crossed her fingers against what wasn’t far off a lie. ‘I’d been thinking about moving back and now the tenant’s given notice and is going a bit early it seems like a sort of sign.’
Naomi, superstitious to the point of crossing the busiest road to meet a black cat, looked satisfied enough with that. ‘I know you feel you and Rachel need to get on with your own lives in your own home, and I’m glad you knew you had this place to run to when you needed it. But don’t think you’ve got to rush at it, just because your house is empty. If you need more time here, you can stay as long as you like. Because you’re the one that needs looking after, aren’t you? Not me. So when you do go, promise me you won’t do anything silly.’
There was a pause while Viola mentally filled in the words: ‘Like hook up with yet another complete no-hoper of a man.’
‘No going up ladders,’ Naomi warned after some long seconds, her forefinger up, threatening to wag.
‘Mum, that was nearly twenty years ago!’ Viola laughed.
‘Seems like yesterday to me. You wait till Rachel’s the one sneaking out nights and then trying to climb back in way after midnight like you did. Even now I worry when you’re out that you’ve lost your key again, and you’ll do something daft and break your neck trying to get in. You were lucky it was only your ankle that time.’
Viola briefly thought back to her teenage years and how she and her friends had only really felt like ‘themselves’ when they were out. How else, other than by some dangerous climbing, were you supposed to get back into the house when you’d lost your key down the loo in the pub and were sliding home at 2 a.m., hoping you could sneak into bed without your mum noticing you were way past curfew time? It had only been as her foot had gone through the rotten tread on the ladder that it crossed her mind there’d been a good reason why it had been left to fall apart beside the log pile rather than been tidied away in the shed.
‘Well, I wouldn’t break any bones climbing in here, would I? The flat’s on the ground floor and the lock on the French doors would probably give way with a sharp tug. In fact, before Rachel and I go back to Bell Cottage, I’m going to make a list of things that need mending here. We must get someone in to fix them for you. Or … I was just wondering about that place where Monica lives. Have you ever thought of …’
‘No, I haven’t thought,’ Naomi interrupted abruptly. ‘I’m staying here and I don’t want any fuss.’ She was starting to get huffy. ‘And I don’t want folks in here, poking around. The fixtures and fittings have stayed in one piece this long, I reckon they’ll see me out.’ She got out of her chair, moving as nimbly as a twenty-something, the tiny mirrors on her old Moroccan hippy skirt twinkling in the sunlight. ‘Right,’ she said, with a sudden sunny smile, ‘I think a nice piece of ham, an egg and some fried potatoes would be the thing. Then Midsomer.’
There were some occasions for which you were very grateful for a bit of backup, Viola thought, as she sat squashed beside Rachel in the back of Marco’s Mini watching Oxshott woods roll past. One more person on her side in the face of Kate and Miles’s opposition to her moving out of their mother’s house was very welcome. Rachel was quiet, absorbed in stitching a row of silver sequins round the neckline of a fluffy lime angora cardigan. Naomi was in the front beside Marco, for once having very little to say other than questioning the accuracy of the satnav and asking him to switch off the voice on the grounds that they knew perfectly well how to get there and that it ‘sounds bossy’.
‘Pot and kettle,’ Viola heard him murmur, catching his eye in the rear-view mirror and sharing a humour moment. She was so glad he’d called on Saturday morning to ask her out for one of their regular lunches. ‘I’ll be all alone,’ he’d told her. ‘Poor darling James has been forced to go to an utterly dull team-building thingy in the Midlands. What paintballing your workmates has to do with banking is beyond me. It probably explains a lot about the state of the global economy.’ She could almost feel him shudder down the phone, and he’d been delighted to be asked along to Kate and Rob’s with her today instead. Kate didn’t mind at all about the extra guest – she and Marco had always got on well. She’d even made lusciously opulent velvet cushion covers for the flat where he and James lived.
‘It’ll be fun to see Kate again,’ Marco had enthused. ‘I hope she’s doing her roast pork. I shall wear pink. It always makes Rob feel so chuffed that I’m being a screaming stereotype. It’s something to tell his golfing chums.’
Rob and Kate lived in the middle of a golf course in a house with toughened glass windows. Viola wondered how they could feel safe there in summer, when if they were out in the garden a mishit golf ball could (and did at least daily) come hurtling over the fence at any moment.
‘You can see all the way from the fourteenth tee to the water hazard from our top windows,’ Rob would tell visitors, as proudly as if this was right up there with a view of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
‘You couldn’t risk a greenhouse,’ was Naomi’s opinion. ‘I met a woman once whose greenhouse window was broken by a golf ball and when she made a salad months later she found glass inside a tomato.’
‘I don’t know why he had to come with us.’ Naomi had got Viola to herself in the kitchen while Kate was down the garden showing Marco and Rachel the frogs in her pond. ‘It’s supposed to be a family day.’
‘Marco is family, Mum. He’ll always be Rachel’s dad, and besides, you know I love him to bits – we’re still absolutely best mates. You have to get over this; it’s been years.’
‘Oh, you know I adore him really, but he should never have married you. Not if he were going to change his mind and start preferring men. I mean, a husband who suddenly decides he’s on the other bus; what does that say?’
Viola picked up Kate’s Cath Kidston floral oven glove, took the lid off a pan and prodded a fork into a piece of boiling carrot. It was the safer alternative to prodding it into her mother, who was on one of her favourite long-term topics: that Marco turning out to be gay after marrying her daughter was a slur on Viola and by extension a slur on herself and her entire family, possibly going back several generations and set to afflict many a one to come.
‘He was only young. We both were. We hardly knew what we were – apart from me being a bit pregnant.’ Viola added teasingly, ‘And anyway, it could just as easily have been me. I could have discovered I was a lesbian and run off to live with a girl.’
‘Now you’re just being daft,’ Naomi said. ‘You’re only saying that to provoke and it’s water off a duck’s. I just hope the next man you take up with isn’t as much of a disaster area as the first two have been.’
Viola drained the carrots into a colander and considered possible interpretations of the term ‘justifiable homicide’.
‘Don’t worry about that,’ she said, feeling a bit deflated. ‘There won’t be a next one.’
‘Yes, well, you say that now. But you’re still young – just – so think on,’ Naomi told her, leaving Viola thoroughly warned that romance was absolutely a three-strikes-and-you’re-out game, and she was about to run out of chances. And also years. ‘Just’? That was new.
In the interests of golf-ball avoidance Kate and Rob had compromised on the possibility of a sunny outdoor lunch in the garden and had slid back their heavy patio doors as far as they’d go, ‘to let the outside in’, as Rob put it. The sweet scent of pinks wafted in but was quickly defeated by the clammy aroma of Kate’s famous roast pork and steamy vegetables. Kate liked a fully dressed table and it was draped with double cloths, heavy damask napkins, and (as Marco whispered to Viola) enough cutlery, glasses and plates to furnish an embassy banquet. With that, the swagged and tied-back floral curtains (made by Kate, along with every cushion cover, bedspread and padded headboard in the house) and all the wall space crammed with Kate and Rob’s family photos, Viola felt smothered and claustrophobic and wished they were outside in the fresh air having a casual barbecue. It would make breathing easier when the inevitable telling-off happened. And she knew it would – she’d already caught Miles and Kate exchanging looks. Building up to the strike, getting the timing right, she’d guess. Miles was looking flushed and twitchy. He kept touching the side of his head as if to check his hair was still there. Not much of it was, these days, but as if to compensate there was quite a lot more stomach.
‘I see you’ve put Aidan’s degree certificate up along with yours and Rob’s,’ Naomi commented, pointing to a newly framed addition to the wall: a photo of Kate and Rob’s elder son, an embarrassed-looking young man in a mortar board, clutching said certificate in its just-presented rolled-up form. Close by were Kate’s and Rob’s own graduation photographs. In hers, Kate had a blonde bubble perm, and the now-balding Rob sported a wispy gingery mullet in his.
‘You look so goody-goody in this, Kate,’ Viola remarked. ‘But I remember being so impressed that you had a really punky kilt thing on under the academic gown, all safety pins and rips. Everyone else was all tidy in knee-length skirts and white blouses. I thought you were the coolest sister.’
‘A long, long time ago,’ Kate said, looking dreamy, as if she’d been a different person. She might well have been, Viola thought, considering Kate’s journey from all-out punk to such formal tableware preferences. ‘And on that wall,’ Kate went on, handing round the potatoes, ‘I’ve just enough space for Henry’s, then we’re done, all finished.’ Viola saw her shoot a glance at Rob and was surprised to see a look of near-hatred on her face. Rob, benign and jovial, was oblivious, and carried on telling Miles about his chances of becoming golf-club captain.
‘Never was one to hide her light, that one,’ Naomi murmured to Rachel. ‘Give me paintings on a wall any day. A craggy landscape with some proper stormy weather in it, like my Oliver Stonebridge ones in the hall. Or they could put up a great big Rothko print or two. Family photos belong in albums, for private viewing, not up and out for showing off.’
Viola, still a bit shocked by the look that should have felled Rob, also thought the ‘we’re done’ statement sounded strange, as if Kate’s family life would be somehow ‘cooked’ by then, and would need no more nurturing. Of all their clan, she wouldn’t have had Kate down as being anything less than forever family-minded, one hundred per cent domestic goddess (in spite, as Miles pointed out as they ate, of being foolhardy enough to opt for pork when there wasn’t an R in the month) and a potential nightmare for any future daughters-in-law. Irons, to Kate’s household men, were things that lived in golf bags and had little knitted Aran hats. She used to tell Viola off for never ironing bedlinen, having once caught her doing a perfunctory fluff-and-fold and piling everything straight into the airing cupboard.
It wasn’t till the pudding (a chocolate tart, with strawberries, raspberries and clotted cream) was served that the real subject of the gathering at last surfaced for discussion. Viola had been wondering whether Miles or Kate would raise it first. They’d been waiting for their moment. She guessed Naomi felt the same and smiled at her across the table. Naomi winked back.
Miles always made Viola feel like a pupil who has disappointed a concerned teacher. So far, he’d contributed little to the lunch conversation other than to tell them that his wife Serena was away on a weekend watercolour course and was sorry to miss them all.
‘I bet,’ Kate whispered to Viola. ‘Last time it was a bridge cruise. Never home, lucky cow.’
‘Now, Viola. I hear you’re moving out of Mum’s flat,’ Miles began, the moment everyone had picked up their spoons, adding with a slow, sad smile, ‘and leaving her on her own.’
‘Yea, ’tis true – we’re going home!’ Rachel said.
Miles, formal in a cream linen suit that somehow didn’t dare crease, and striped tie, turned to her. ‘You needn’t sound so delighted.’ Rachel flinched.
‘Why not?’ Marco defended her. ‘She’ll get her own room back and all her stuff out of storage, she can have friends round. What’s not to like?’
‘Well, it does rather leave a problem, don’t you think?’ Miles leaned forward towards him across the table. The tie threatened to dangle in his pudding. Viola watched it, fascinated, hoping it would. That would challenge her so-older brother’s air of supreme authority.
Marco put his head on one side and made an exaggerated thinking face. ‘Um … does it?’
‘When you pull that face you look like a budgie,’ Kate snapped at him. He winced. ‘This is serious,’ she declared.
‘Pudding wine, anyone?’ Rob waved a bottle of Vin Santo.
‘Not now, Rob.’ Kate now turned on him. ‘We’re talking.’ She paused, then smiled at Viola.
‘Now, Viola, darling,’ she began. ‘Have you really thought this through? Miles and I are thinking your memories of Bell Cottage can’t be happy ones.’
‘I’ve already told you, Kate. My memories of living there are more happy than not. We’re going back. Mum’s fine with it.’ She thought f
leetingly of Rhys. He’d lived there with her and Rachel for less than a year, and hadn’t added much more to the place than his toothbrush and a Top Gear boxed set. ‘He’s not a settler,’ his own mother had warned. ‘Don’t think he won’t wander.’ Oh, he’d wandered all right. Why had the fact he’d promised her he’d changed made her believe he actually had? What an idiot she’d been.
‘You can’t be OK with this, Mum?’ Kate turned her attention to Naomi. ‘Who’s going to look after you?’
‘I’ll look after myself,’ Naomi insisted. ‘I always have. I didn’t need babysitting before Vee and Rachel moved in and I don’t now. Nothing’s changed in the time they’ve been with me. While I can still drive, walk and find my way to the bathroom in good time I’ll be all right.’
‘I think Viola’s being very selfish,’ Miles said. ‘She’s had your hospitality for all this time and now you’re getting frailer she’s bailing out.’ He paused. ‘The best thing all round would be for Viola to stay put. Maybe spread out from the flat a bit …’
‘Or,’ Marco suggested, ‘you could sell your house, Naomi. Get something easier to manage, blow the rest on gin and toy boys. I know, you could live in seaside hotels, have room service and put bets on the gee-gees in the afternoons.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ Miles snapped at him. ‘She can’t sell the house!’
‘Why not?’ Viola said. ‘What’s to stop her?’
‘It’s the family home. The base. Our base,’ Kate began, exchanging a glance with Miles across the table.
‘That’s right.’ He backed her up. ‘For over thirty years. You don’t just walk away.’
‘But you haven’t lived there since you were eighteen, either of you.’ Viola was puzzled. ‘And, Miles, you were about sixteen when we moved in – so hardly there at all, really. If it’s anyone’s childhood home, it’s surely mine. And I don’t mind if Mum wants to go somewhere else, somewhere a bit easier to cope with. It’s not about bricks and stuff, surely?’
